Starbounders rejoice!

Well, I really, REALLY don't get where the reference to dark souls and Starbound come in, regardless? People keep liking them to each other, but, how are they similar? Starbound is really a casual game by design, not the least of which is the wide mod support. If there is an aspect of it you don't like, it is almost guaranteed that someone will share your taste, and make a mod for it. And it will almost certainly fit in. The everything goes funtime aesthetic Starbound has going for it, is one of its charms.

 

I believe the similarities are focused on the fact that you drop valuables on death that are able to be picked up. The overall difficulty of the two games, however, is vastly different, so they're not really comparable.

 

The only valid point is that you can just dig down quickly for ore.

The good reason to lower risk is for those of us that don't want to use cheaty exploits like walling in enemies or logout teleports. We should not be balancing difficulty around players who use exploits.

If you insist on cheesing it, then you are at fault for the game being too easy.

 

Ah, the ol' "scrub tactics" ploy...

Walling in enemies to keep them away is a totally valid and acceptable use of the matter manipulator. Hell the concept is part of building a house! Its not rocket science to see how it works. Refusing to take the options that either help you kill the mobs or keep them off of you is intentionally limiting yourself.

You think the mobs care about fairness, or the purity of combat?

 

Don't imply I'm using a ploy.

Mobs will be able to dig in the future so that cheese tactic that shouldn't be happening finally won't. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's intended. Or are you suggesting the Devs intended the players to bury mobs in mud and poke them to death via a tiny hole?

Walling enemies in is an exploit plain and simple.

This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

And for the record I believe in battle and war there are no rules... but this is a video game and covering enemies with mud or w/e material to win isn't fun. I don't want the game balanced around that garbage.

 

Walling enemies is NOT an exploit... it is a method of play. So is out maneuvering them. So is out gunning them.
Don't imply something is an exploit.

And yes, if tar ends up being sticky, I will dump tar on mobs and proceed to pelt them to death with paper airplanes, if I so fancy. Why? Because I find it amusing.

It's a game. For fun. So I will have fun with the game they are making, using ALL the features.

 

you say that and then say that darksouls is a good challenging game, even tho it also makes you drop all your money/XP when you die

tho on topic, i do like this option its nice for people who just want to mess around without fear of being hunted down for ores in MP pvp

 

You really wanna get in an argument with a Souls fan on how Bloodstain retrieval is better than losing all ores and such on death? Fine, whatever. Every single level in Dark Souls is handcrafted, every enemy is a static placement even when they respawn. You know exactly where you died, what enemies are on the path to your bloodstain, and should have a general idea of how to combat them because when you see an enemy's attacks and spells, you then know what they are capable of. You see a Black Knight wielding a Black Knight Sword and see him use his attacks, you know that every other Black Knight using a Black Knight Sword will have the exact same pattern. You see a Wheel Skeleton's attacks, you've seen every other Wheel Skeleton's attacks. You know there are only two place where a group of Wheel Skeletons will be, the bottom of The Catacombs, and inside the well of The Painted World of Ariamis, they will never appear anywhere else in the game. If an enemy knocks you off a ledge to your death, your bloodstain and thus souls (it's not called XP/money in the Souls fandom, it's always called souls) will always appear at the spot which lead to your death, so the bloodstain would be at the spot where the enemy struck you, not at the spot where you died on impact with the ground.

In Starbound? Seeing an enemy doesn't tell you what they're capable of, and I'd have to see a video of the Nightly build's combat with several monsters that look the same before I change my stance on them having the same or random attacks. Even still, your items would drop at the spot where you died, where that be in lava, a kill-zone (core of an asteroid 'planet' biome), the ground that you landed on and died. They'd be all spread out and up for the taking by PvPers, or disappear after you crash or exit the game for whatever reason. You never have to worry about Invaders stealing your bloodstain in DkS, it's there for you and you alone, and it's only disappearing under two conditions: You touch the bloodstain and get your lost souls and Humanity back, or if you die again, no amount of crashes or exiting the game will change that. You only ever lost souls, which would be like Pixels in Starbound, you don't lose any Titanite on death (ores needed for upgrades). So if you want this to be remotely fair, you'd have to convince Tiy to make it so the lost pixels and ores/whatever are stored in a kind of floating energy orb of some kind, that will only go away when you interact with it, or die again, and no one else could claim it or remove it through any means, that it would appear at the area where you died if it was by an enemy attack, or close to a ledge if you fell off a ledge and died on the ground or pool of lava. If you want the stuff ending up in lava, then allow it so we can get an item from a boss that allows us to survive more than enough time in lava to claim it (the Orange Charred Ring from the Centipede Demon's tail being chopped off, or killing the boss).

This would also address the concerns of PvP on communities, since gankers couldn't kill you and take all your stuff.... and due to how some servers are, make it so that if you warp down and die immediately due to the Avian Pirate Ship propeller being placed there as a trolling tactic, that the orb containing all your stuff would be right next to your teleporter on your ship.

 

I'm glad the devs finally did this. Some people on the forums were getting close blowing a gasket. Even the ones that didn't play as Glitch

 

Your talking about a single player experience (dark souls) and comparing it to the multiplayer experience in starbound? Anyone else see a flaw in this logic?

If you are going to compare, do so on equal footing. single player starbound vs dark souls. And on that comparison, all your stuff is still where you died... so what is the deal?
Mulitplayer is different, and the server can set it up to only allow "casual" characters... so again, argument invalid.

 

well i havnt played much of darksouls so im just gonna take your word on it =p

 

I feel like jranger right now, cookie to anyone who knows just who and what I mean when I say jranger from the City of Heroes forums.

Dark Souls is not purely single player. If you're in human form and connected, then you are subject to Multiplayer, co-op, invasions, Dragon Covenant Duels, Gravelording, seeing other bloodstains and orange soapstone messages. It's not a traditional form of multiplayer, but yes, Dark Souls is multiplayer enough that you cannot simply call it a single player experience unless you spend the whole time offline, never summon anyone, stay hollow, or simply disconnect on being invaded. If you read how I mentioned that Invaders are incapable of stealing your souls via touching the Bloodstain (anyone using the one-handed R2 attack for the Dark Hand can drain Humanity if the grab hits). Yet in Starbound, all your items drop to the ground like in Minecraft, aside from pixels, for you to pick up, but so can anyone else on a server. I was asked why I said DkS was a good and challenging game when even if you die, you drop all your souls and humanity upon death (aside from being cursed) via bloodstain, and I pointed out how the bloodstain system was actually fairly light because of how it only vanished under two circumstances, no one else could take them, how the nature of the levels and enemies (static aside from being Gravelorded, so you know where everything is and what it does, so you can always make informced decisions) play to the strengths of the bloodstain system.

In DkS, you don't have to worry about a Darkwraith killing you or a Forest Hunter killing you, as you know where your souls and humanity are, and since you'll be in hollow form, you'll be free from PvP when going for your dropped souls. In Starbound? You have to hope that the items dropped are in a reasonable area. In current starbound MP, PvP is little more for fun or whatever, nothing aside from pixels are lost, but losing ores and such on death? You'll see servers become potentially introverted towards strangers who might just want to kill people and take potentially thousands of ores, ingots, and fuel sources simply for fun. Using a system similar to the bloodstain makes it more fair to the player. They can close the game and the container only they can interact with will still be there.

It's fair to the player, that is what makes for a good and challenging game. Difficult games like Dark Souls sell very well, punishing games that might make it so one unlucky death leaves all your items in an area you can't reach is not something people will find fun, as no amount of 'git gud' will ever stand up to a cheap, punishing death.

 

I think what bothers me is the fact from what I've been reading 'casual' difficulty is also going to include no actual hunger after the system is revamped. I just wanted to not lose my shit when I die, like, how normal mode functions in the current build. I didn't want 'casual' difficulty where everything is freaking nerfed to make the game easier on top of the no ore drops. And I think I can speak for a lot of others when I say all of us just wanted the existing normal difficulty to be unchanged. We wanted to have to scavenge for food and crap. How bloody freaking hard could that have been to leave something unchanged?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_(video_gaming)

Again the Devs did not intend walling enemies in as a method of combat. I didn't imply it's an exploit, I'm stating it as a fact.

It's just abusing game mechanics.

 

Gonna need a source on that.

Finding it a hair hard to swallow that they made the game's central mechanic "manipulating terrain" and not once thought about using that as a defensive measure, like, oh, building a house to keep monsters out or anything.

 

You and I are in complete agreement here. Manipulating terrain encourages these kinds of tactics simply by existing. In games with static terrain, you have to work with the terrain, but in a game like Starbound, you make the terrain work for you however you like, it's a wonderful element of freedom.

 

That's pretty much why calling walling enemies in an "exploit" is absurd. Terrain manipulation is a central mechanic of the game.
In fact, I'd go so far to say that it's definitive to the sandbox genre as a whole (to which Starbound belongs).

Should there be enemies that can bypass walling? Sure. But that doesn't automatically mean that walling is an exploit in their absence.

Nor is it really that great in practice.
Spawn-Despawning mechanics already limit that tactic as a short term solution at best.
Wall one enemy in now, come back and it's gone. Do that for every enemy, and you spend a lot of material and time just playing defense for little gain.
There are situations where the player can benefit from doing this (walling in mini-bosses and loot runs), but golly gee gosh, isn't that the freaking point of a sandbox game? To reward the player for using their resources and environment?

 

In the nightly, many monsters i've come across can destroy terrain. So i think that problem is already being solved.
And if you're worried about loosing ore when you beam down... Why not just empty your inventory, you are already on your ship, duh. Problem solved in two sentences. Your welcome.

 

Is it possible to actually just keep a furnace on you at all times to convert ores to bars as you go along?

 

This just encourages the save+exit thing people like myself already use to quickly warp back to the ship. What's the point in making it so you can lose ores and ingots if the first thing people will default to doing is save+exit to get back to the ship?